Apophenia
by scumblackentropy
Summary: A-po-phen-ia (noun): The pursuit of the human mind to spontaneously construct meaning, order, and purpose from unrelated chaotic structures.


A/N:

I know I've posted this here loads of times and I am so sorry, but I am an indecisive old fart and I edited this story more times than I can count. I apologize for my flakiness, and I do hope it doesn't put you off reading my stories.

The first paragraph I stole entirely from Dashiell Hammett's _The Maltese Falcon_. I tweaked it a bit, but, sadly, that still doesn't make it mine.

* * *

_He wants to die in a lake in Geneva,  
the mountains can cover the shape of his nose.  
He wants to die where nobody can see him,  
but the beauty of his death  
will carry on so,  
I don't believe him._

My Manic and I, by Laura Marling

* * *

Minerva McGonagall's jaw was a cumbersome square, her chin jutting out insolently under the more flexible but just as insolent jut of her lower lip. Her nostrils were square, too. Her eyes were frighteningly stern, but a bit on the wide-set side. The square motif was picked up by full-ish brows slanting upward from papery creases above a long nose. She was pleasant-looking enough some twenty years earlier.

"Oh, and before I forget, you've been appointed a new Healer, Severus. This one will be better; I can already tell. Very talented. A right character."

Minerva (it was difficult still for him to think of her as a person with a real name, instead of the generic title of 'Professor') pursed her lips and began nodding in quick, staccato rhythm. "Yes, yes, a right character. I need your list of supplies on my desk by tomorrow afternoon, no later. Good day."

She shuffled a stack of parchment around on her desk and placed a tartan tin of biscuits on top of it.

"Well?" she said briskly. Everything about her was brisk and dry.

When the man was still a boy (two masters ago, two thousand cigarettes ago, two million quarts of cheap Muggle whiskey ago) there was a legend that went around that Minerva had been mistaken for a professor for an entire school year by the new first year students. Which was a bit of a stretch, but legends will do what legends always do and stretch the facts to something that more closely resembles moist, brown putty than any sort of truth.

The legend went like this: When Minerva was still a prefect in school, the incoming first years thought she was a professor because of her no-nonsense manner and the way she tapped her foot impatiently when they took too long to get up from the Gryffindor table. They all looked at her with apprehensive respect, even though she had yet to say a single word. She liked it. In fact, she liked it so much that she decided that she didn't mind having students look at her that way for the rest of her life, and so she took up teaching as a profession.

Of course, there were always those that insisted on being exceptions to the rule; not all the looks she got were of admiration.

She levelled her eye sternly at the sullen man (who liked being sullen as much as Minerva liked being brisk and dry) seated in front of her desk. This man was one such exception.

"Get moving, then. I'm sure you have more of those—what was it you said? Unteachable, nose-picking, troglodytic abominations to human civilization who have all the intellectual capacity of a group of colourblind hedgehogs thrown in a sack? Well."

The man didn't respond. He narrowed his eyes and found that he could not look at Minerva's, and so he looked around the room. He then found that it was impossible to look at anything in the room without being reminded of unpleasant things, so he stared at his hands instead. His hands were unpleasant looking too, with their knobby, large thumb joints and the jagged veins crawling under tubercular skin, but the unpleasantness of his hands was _his_ to look at, unlike the unpleasantness of the objects in the room, which belonged to Minerva, and previously to Dumbledore.

Minerva waited for him to speak, and he imagined that she was waiting for him to say something sharp. But the man was stubborn. More stubborn, perhaps, than even Dumbledore (bless his dead, manipulating arse, the man thought, not quite fondly) ever was. And the man was intent on maintaining his somber silence.

"_Well,_" Minerva repeated herself, the squares on her face growing square-er. "I'm beginning to think you only took up your post for the opportunity to think up ever more inventive insults."

The man knew he could be right _funny_ when he wanted to be, but he always felt a noble sort of wretchedness whenever he was in this room and he _didn't_ want to be funny at the moment. The man would do as he bloody well pleased.

She straightened and placed her hands, one on top of the other, on her desk. The man knew that she had, predictably, given up on getting him to say something.

"Anyway, I'm sure you've got more of _those_ to inflict your presence upon. Good _day_, Severus."

The man sneered as toxic a sneer as he could manage, which was very, very toxic indeed, but Minerva wasn't even looking at him.

The shrivelled old cunt.

He felt a small, instinctive tendril of guilt curl at the back of his mouth because his mother always told him that it wasn't polite to call people cunts. His mother didn't often scold him, but when she did, her voice got quiet and the air would shimmer around her and she made sure that he remembered exactly what she said. Before he felt too guilty and apologized for calling the Headmistress a cunt in his head, he departed the her office with a well-practiced flourish.

What the bloody fuck does that even mean, a right character?

People said it all the time. You should meet my mate. He's a right character. Usually, it meant that the bloke was nothing more than an attention-starved bastard, someone who can't walk by a hat without trying it on. Some harmless idiot who thought that contrived personality quirks passed for depth of character.

Oh, look at me, aren't I clever? Don't I look hilarious?

You know what it means, don't you? Toby would have said, if he weren't too busy being a shit-faced, woman-beating waste of organic matter.

It means the bastard will likely stick his cock in your pint when you're not looking, is what Toby would have said, squinting and sucking his tongue off those piss-stained teeth that the fates decreed the man should inherit.

But Toby was dead, existing only in the man's dreams as a blurry-faced, leather-clad, drugged-up, smelly old ne'er do well.

Ah, dreams.

Such dreams the man had for himself when he was younger.

Two masters, eight broken ribs, one perforated lung, and a billion quarts of liquor ago.

You were always the cleverest out of all of them, his Master used to say. Oh, the Master knew the sort of stock the man came from. An utterly banal Muggle greebo and an utterly banal Pureblood runaway, a family of three holed up against the world in a dirty house in Manchester. Spinner's End? his Master laughed. My dear boy, only the greatest of Pureblood Houses are christened with names, even one as utterly banal as 'Spinner's End.'

But you were always cleverer than the lot of them, the Master used to say. Even the man's name, the only good thing he received from his parents, was edged and menacing like a blade slipping slowly through muscle.

The others were always better off than him. Better dressed, better smelling. Less greasy. When he was younger, his hair was greasy because his family had no money, and he'd never got into the habit of washing any part of himself regularly. When he got older and he was able to afford things like hot water and toiletries, he kept his hair greasy more out of spite than anything. Oh, he wanted to impress Lucius' set, to be sure. But not so much that they thought he'd gladly perform a little jig for them, if they asked nicely enough.

They were born into the sort of families that he dreamed about in his bed in banal little Spinner's End. But the man was born into cunning. He didn't have a Knut to his name, but the Fates gifted him with an alacrity of mind that his mother always told him would take him places. The others knew this and humored the poor, skinny little boy who always looked like he would topple forward from the weight of his funny (Oh, have you _ever_ seen a nose like that in your life, Cissy? Just _look_ at it!) nose.

'Sev,' they called him. He hated it. He hated it and he showed them that a man born with a name like his did not stand for puerile, asinine nicknames like _Sev_. He showed them good.

He'd always been clever.

But it hardly gets you anywhere, does it? the man thought grimly, stalking the halls with a forbidding scowl spread across his cut-glass face. The man was Severus Snape, and Severus Snape was nothing if not a man of grim thoughts.

This train of thought inevitably brought him to thinking about the first war, and The Love of his Life, and how _she_ never appreciated how clever Snape really was. But she was beautiful. She was so beautiful, and pure, and virtuous, and radiant, and celestial.

There was one instance in Snape's youth when he walked in on The Love of his Life gossiping with some Hufflepuff nobody about a seventh year boy who was, in their words, 'cut' and 'hunky,' which wasn't very celestial of her. He did not like this memory. He preferred the one where he languished, hungry and cold, on the floor in front of the Fat Lady's portrait, and she, so beautiful, so virtuous in her white nightgown, rebuffed him because such light and such darkness could never be together, and he knew then that his love for her was doomed, and that his life would be gloriously tragic and noble and miserable.

This then brought him to thinking about the second war, and how The Love of his Life's son was just as ungrateful, arrogant, and untalented as could be expected from the spawn of a Potter. And what did the boy get for being such a swollen-headed little toerag? An Order of Merlin. First-fucking-Class. His spotty face plastered all over the Wizarding World and his name thrown around with words like 'salvation,' and 'deliverance,' and _'sacrifice_.'

Two fucking wars, and all Snape got to show for it was a scrofulous scar on an already stringy neck. He didn't want a sodding medal, but he would have liked to _not_ be afflicted with a permanently achy knee and a hideous scar.

The narcissist in him, which was a considerably large part of him, sometimes thought that the scar was handsome, indeed.

Well, maybe not handsome.

No, _goddamnit_, nothing on Snape's person could be described as handsome without a good dose of mean-spirited facetiousness. Snape's scowl dripped ever farther down his chin at the remembrance of many, many occasions of mean-spirited facetiousness during his childhood and well into his adulthood.

Maybe not handsome, but definitely striking. Yes, he'd take striking over handsome any fucking day. What is handsome, anyway? _Pillocks_ and _fops_ were handsome. People like Sirius _bleeding_ Black were handsome. _Not I_, thought Snape with some satisfaction, rippling his robes about himself as he rounded the corner.

This was only on the good days, when his students weren't busy being spiteful sacks of shit and savagery. The man gave a little twitch to his top lip, which is the closest he ever came to any sort of happiness (sibilants are very pleasing to him, and a series of sibilants infinitely more so).

On the good days, the narcissist in him liked to fold the collar of his robes just the slightest bit, so that the tapered edge of the scar was just visible. Very intimidating. Especially with the Billow and the Sneer. He was grateful that the war didn't deprive him of his special ability to Billow and Sneer. Very intimidating, indeed.

On the bad days, which were almost everyday, Severus Snape liked to brood about how rough he had it. Now, it is important to note that while Severus Snape hated most everything, he quite enjoyed brooding. Had liked it ever since he was the boy Severus Snape. Brooding time for him was, in fact, the highest point of his day. It was all downhill from there. He found a very deep, illicit sort of satisfaction in dazzling everyone with the tragedy of his scowl, and the way people gave his grimness a wide berth almost made up for the two fucking wars, and the scrofulous scar, and the utterly banal hatefulness of everything. In this way the man Severus Snape was really still the boy Severus Snape.

The rain had let up this morning, which meant that his scar wouldn't throb for the rest of the day. But, on the other hand, Snape hadn't had his morning wank yet. Let's not be children here. Yes, Snape liked to wank. He was as much a fucking wanker as any of your Muggle equivalents to a Potions professor.

Anyway, Snape hadn't had his morning wank because he'd woken up sweaty and exhausted, and he'd woken up sweaty and exhausted because his subconscious had decided to start up on those fucking nightmares again. The war ended eight years ago, and still with those fucking nightmares. He'd woken up two hours earlier than the already inhumanly early hour that he usually woke at.

And he wasn't sure he'd have the time for it later on. His morning wank, that is. And so it was bound to be a Bad Day. Snape liked to count the days as bad until the last possible minute, and only then would he grudgingly admit that things weren't as woefully shit-smeared as he'd thought.

Such dreams, I say, the-man-who-was-really-a-boy had for himself when he was younger.

Hardly gets you anywhere, does it? the man thought again. He was surprised when he found himself standing in front of the staff room door. The trip was a lot shorter than he remembered. He bit the inside of his cheek in a gesture left over from his days as a mannerless, Mancunian-lilted whelp.

This had been happening far too often lately; doors appearing out of nowhere, clocks ticking way too fast, hallways rearranging themselves, random bits of chaos that insinuated themselves into his everyday routine until he forgot about how things were. Snape was a man who found meaning in order and structure, but after the war, order and structure abandoned him into a permanent state of discomfiture and slight nausea. There was also the wonky knee.

He pushed forth his magic and watched as the door to the staff room slammed against the wall with an offended shudder. Snape loomed ominously under the doorway for a moment, just in case the staff room was occupied. There weren't very many stances that flattered Severus Snape's figure, but looming in doorways was definitely one of them. The staff room was, unfortunately, quite empty. Snape billowed in, fixed himself a cup of coffee so grimly black that it smelt and tasted like tar, and took a seat.

Once ensconced in the cavernous wing-backed chair (his favorite), he thought about how the world killed all his dreams. Morning time was brooding time, and he fully intended to get his money's worth. If he thought deeper, he would realize that the dreams of the boy Severus Snape were rather vague and unglamorous, centering mostly around getting a leg over The Love of His Life and somehow simultaneously murdering James Potter in a blaze of blood and glory. But brooding time is not honesty time. Honesty time was reserved for special occasions only, like murdering one's Headmaster, or almost-dying in the Shrieking Shack.

Picture this: the man (who was really a boy) was sitting peacefully in the staff room; minding his own business; contemplating the possibility of a quick wank before his 10 AM class; pondering the lamentable, inevitable tragedy of the life of the offspring of a greebo and a runaway; steepling his long, tragically ink-stained fingers in the traditional Brooding pose of those Forgotten Men whose dreams were killed by the world; and, most importantly, sitting _alone_. Severus Snape was (grimly) content.

And then, as the Fates would have it, the girl walked in. All of a sudden. Just when he thought he was rid of her for good.

_Shit_, Snape thought. He felt justified in his earlier conviction that today would be a Bad Day. He blinked twice and made a mental note to belittle some clerk at St. Mungo's for the deplorable quality of their Antipsychotic potions.

The girl entered the staffroom like she was engaging in an illicit tryst, all timid and tip-toed and rumpleheaded. Although, Snape noted with some confusion, she wasn't quite as rumpleheaded as he remembered. In fact, her head appeared to be several inches smaller in diameter than it used to be. He drew back into the dull-colored darkness of his chair, imagining the look of abject shock on her face as he revealed his presence. _Miss Granger_, he would sneer with such potent malice that she would positively _shrivel_ with the knowledge of how much she wasn't wanted here.

_P-p-p-p-profess-ssor!_ she would stutter pathetically, because in Snape's head, none of his students actually spoke like normal functioning human beings. Instead, they emitted a series of pathetic squeaks, or whined, or, most of the time, grunted in all their wretched ignorance. Then she would huff out some half-hearted apology for how she left him to die in the Shack, how she should have known to trust him. He would gaze on stoically and interrupt her before the chit burst into the self-righteous tears of unfulfilled regret. He would say something cutting, he didn't know what yet, perhaps something about her shrunken head. He would inform her that he needed her pitiful apologies like he needed another set of fang-marks on his neck. She, feeling unbearably humiliated, would flee, her baggy robes flapping about her skinny ankles. The door would swing shut behind her, and the dusty silence would welcome him back into its fold.

The thing with his hallucinations was that, despite being horribly inconvenient, they were rather sadly predictable. Everything would happen just as it had countless times before.

The girl walked to the counter and started puttering about with the tea things. Snape stood.

"_Miss Granger_," he sneered.

The girl barely even turned around. From his new position, he noticed that her head hadn't shrunk at all. Her hair was pulled back from her face in a style he'd never seen before. The scraggly bun was almost as big as her head. He waited for what she would say this time.

"Ew. It's you," she stated flatly.

Snape drew back as if the girl had just poked his scar with her stupid, self-righteous finger. _Ew?_

He tried to remember if The Love of His Life ever said something as utterly stultifying as the word Ew. She did not, because she was beautiful and righteous and celestial.

"_Ew?_" he rasped. "A bit of advice, Miss Granger. It is far better to let someone think you are an idiot than to open your mouth and prove it. I was under the impression that you possessed the vocabulary of a thirty-year-old woman. Although, I am not at all surprised that you have, once again, managed to disappoint expectations."

His delivery was not as smooth as it once was. While the war let him keep his Sneer and his Billow, it did not let him keep his Voice. Snape liked his Voice. But, like any other miserable bastard, Snape knew how to make the rasp work for him. With enough practice, people were made just as uncomfortable by his rasp as by his horrible, piss-colored Sneer. Everyone, that is, except for Minerva.

The shrivelled cunt.

The girl's shoulders stiffened, then relaxed. She stirred her drink, her tea spoon _clink-clinking_ hard against the sides of her mug. Snape wouldn't have been surprised if the tea spoon _clink-clinked_ all the way across the room.

"I'm twenty-seven," she growled stiffly. _Ah_, thought Snape, feeling quite reimbursed. He rather preferred this older, stiffer Hermione Granger to the younger, bubblier, pointy-elbowed and jabby-fingered version. That is, if he had any preferences with respect to Hermione Granger. He didn't. All her versions could rot in hell, for all he cared.

"And I didn't say _ew_, Snape. I said oh. As in: _Oh_, it's you. Jesus. You certainly haven't changed a bit."

She cradled her steaming mug in both hands and plopped herself in the chair opposite his.

"For goodness' sake, sit down. You look like you're about to flap off into the air."

Snape sat down. Being seated, Snape found it quite impossible to Billow, and so he bared his teeth in a yawning crack that stretched all the way forever across his face. Like he meant it. He was gratified when the girl caught a sight of him and visibly recoiled.

"Erm.. You really should stop drinking so much coffee," she said, nodding toward him, making it very clear that she was referring to the state of his piss-colored teeth. The girl gave him a sage nod like she was imparting the wisdom of the universe, and she was waiting for him to thank her for it.

"Yes, thank you. My teeth are yellow, my nose is hooked, my hair is greasy, and I am about as attractive as a festering pustule on a Weasley's ginger-furred scrotum. Meanwhile, you have all the creativity of a wad of used toilet paper. Do try harder."

He was pleased with his wit, but was immediately put out when he noticed that she was too busy inspecting her tea spoon for imaginary water stains to appreciate it.

"Sorry, what was that? I just grabbed this from basket over there. Are these clean? I seem to recall maintenance being much more thorough when I was a student. Of course, if they were paid decent wages, I'm sure they would be doing a much better job."

Of all the judgmental, self-aggrandizing former students to walk through the staff room door, it just had to be Hermione Granger. Snape would rant and rave if he didn't have such a hard time getting to his feet these days.

And if he weren't so fucking unsettled.

Aside from the fact that this Hermione Granger appeared to be thoroughly un-intimidated by his full arsenal of looming and sneering and teeth-baring, this whole scenario was vastly different from the past ones his ailing mind had conjured up.

He settled for a whispered _damn it all to fucking hell_. Then he raised his eyebrow. The left one, for maximum snideness.

She raised one in return and proceeded to pull out a sandwich from a little paper bag. She conjured a plate and set the sandwich smack-dab in the middle of it, staring at it for a few seconds. She picked it up and began eating in a circular pattern, starting at the crust and working inward. Really, what sort of reprobate ate in that manner?

He had meant to ask her why in the bloody hell was she eating her sandwich that way (not that he cared, but he thought she should have the decency to at least explain why she was being so fucking _strange_ today), but instead what came out was:

"I watched you die eight years ago."

"There's no need to be rude," she frowned around a horseradish-y mouthful. "Honestly. What a horrid thing to say."

"What are you doing here, Granger?"

"It's Weasley," she said quickly. Then she paused, as if pondering some internal complication. He hoped she was. He hoped it was so complicated that she would ponder herself all the way back to her grave. "Actually, no. It _was_ Weasley, all up until two weeks ago. You can call me whatever, I suppose."

"As fascinating as the state of your marriage is to me, I'm afraid you did not answer my question. What _the hell_ are you doing here, Granger?"

"I'm eating," she said slowly, looking at him like he was too stupid to understand the basic concept of human nutrition.

She continued to work around her sandwich.

Snape decided that the best way to be rid of this... apparition? Hallucination?—was to play along. He hadn't had any hallucinations for three months now, and the last time _she_ starred in any of them was two years ago.

"What?" she said when she noticed him staring. "All the good stuff is in the center, and I'm saving that for last."

A crumb fell unnoticed from her mouth to the floor. Snape sneered even harder. It was _his_ fucking staff room, _his_ bloody brooding time, and, with the clock on the wall showing nine fifty-three, he knew that there was no time for a quick wank before the 10 AM, and that this was his only shot at squeezing some worth out of today.

"I see your husband's charm has rubbed off on you. What are you doing _here_, in _Hogwarts_?" Snape rasped with a rather impressive calm, considering how quickly everything was once again dissolving into pure liquid shit.

"_Ooooohhhhhh,_ is that what you meant?" she said in a long breath, and Snape wondered if the stories were true, if she really led Potter and Weasley on the run from the Death Eaters for months in the forest somewhere. He decided it was impossible, because hardened war heroes, _dead_ war heroes, did not go _ooooohhhhhhh_ like idiot schoolgirls.

"Well," she said, sticking up her nose with no small amount of self-satisfaction, "I work here. I can't tell you what I'm doing. It's _class-if-ied_." She enunciated each syllable separately, clearly relishing each one.

Snape glanced again at the clock. It was nine fifty-seven. Now there was _really_ no time for a quick wank, not even the quickest, most unsatisfying wank in the world, and even less time for some well-earned, top-shelf Brooding.

Feeling thoroughly cheated, Snape put on his Sneer again. This time, however, the girl was busy blowing the steam off the surface of her tea, and was far too thick-skulled to sense the waves of hatred and barely concealed aggression he was sending her way. His Brooding time, like his dreams, was stolen from him forever.

"What could you possibly be doing that would be _classified_? You're dead. There isn't exactly an abundance of job openings for your lot."

"Piss off, Snape. You're just sore because you can tell that I'm most probably being paid more than you are. _Honestly_. You're dead? You're losing your touch." The girl pushed her tongue into her cheek to delve for a renegade bit of ham or whatever Muggle-processed dead animal was in her sandwich. Disgusting. He kindly informed her of what he thought of her eating habits.

"You know, I used to care so much what you thought about me. I don't anymore. In fact, I give so little of a shit; it's not even funny. I'm serious," she said, nodding slowly. "You cannot possibly comprehend the depth with which I. Do. Not. Care."

She didn't have a right to look so bloody _uppity_, the foolish, buck-toothed, know-it-all, slender-throated, woolly-headed, sharp-lipped, _dead_ bint. He wanted her to go away very badly.

"Is that all?" he gritted out through his teeth. "Or do you wish to persist in cluttering up my brain with your repulsive presence?"

He eyed her up and down. Her hair was pulled back so severely from her face that it gave her eyebrows a slightly surprised tilt. The look was not terribly unattractive on her, but the overall effect was drab, drab, drab. Dead or not, she was still unbelievably plain. And what's more, she seemed to have gained a bit of weight since his last episode.

Ah, weight gain, the dirtiest, most below-the-belt of targets. And Severus Snape is nothing if not grim, and dirty, and thoroughly below-the-belt. Why, he practically _lived_ below the belt. He was _king_ of that barren, friendless region called Below-The-Belt.

His last Healer told him to just play along if this sort of thing ever happened again. And play along he shall.

"Tell me, Granger, will I be having the distinct pleasure of instructing your little Granger-Weasleys in the future?" The man sneered. Not just sneered, but Sneered.

"What? Sorry, I wasn't listening." Severus Snape refused to be irked by the fact that the girl was just _sitting there_, stirring sugar into her tea like she wasn't invading his privacy and completely crapping all over his day.

"Perhaps less sugar will do you well, Granger."

"Oh, no, my parents were dentists, you see. I had almost no sugar at all when I was younger, and my teeth are perfect so I don't have to worry about it. Not like you. I mean, I don't mean to be rude or anything. It's not that you don't deserve my rudeness, but I'm a better person than that. Anyway, my point is that your teeth are ghastly and they could really use some work."

Snape gritted his ghastly teeth. He hoped fervently that something she loved would catch fire.

"What I'm trying to say is that you got fat, Granger," Snape spat nastily. His mother told him not to call people fat, too, but he felt very strongly that the Granger girl deserved it because she was a fat cunt. He felt some of his earlier contentment return as the stupid grin slowly melted off the girl's face.

And the man Severus Snape thought, Hermione Granger—McGonagall's reason for existence, Flitwick's little pet, Harry Potter's tag-along dictionary, Hogwarts' pride—brilliant, self-possessed, capable, oh-my-fucking-Merlin-you-have-so-much-potential Hermione Granger: fifteen pounds heavier, presumably separated from her ginger-topped cinder block of a husband, and are those wrinkles around her eyes? At twenty-seven?

If she really was alive, then she turned out to be far less than what people thought she would become. And if she was dead, then she was _dead_, and it didn't get much worse than that, did it? Maybe his subconscious was trying to make up for all those nightmares by conjuring up a hallucination that went in his favor, for once.

Perhaps the day was going to be a Good Day, after all.

Granger screwed her lips shut and pressed them together into a thin, angry line. When she opened her mouth again to speak, her voice was almost frightening in its understated acrimony. Snape would have been frightened if he hadn't been surrounded by frightening people all his life.

"You know, you're awfully calm for someone who's convinced he's talking to a dead woman."

_Woman,_ she called herself. He would laugh if he weren't so bloody hacked off.

"Perhaps I _am_ insane, Granger. Why don't you try holing yourself up in this castle for the better part of two decades and see where that gets you? I'm doing far better than _you_ are, I'm sure. What, do they only offer birthday cake for tea at whatever institution you've managed to worm yourself into?"

"If teaching were easy, they would have called it _your mother_, Snape!" she snapped. She furrowed her brows, then pinched the bridge of her nose. When she spoke again, she sounded tired.

"I suppose this is the part where you try to analyze me with your whip-sharp observation skills and find out that I turned out to be a failure to make yourself feel better about your life. So here it is: Ron and I are separated, I am unable to have children, my job is a soul-sucking purgatory, and yes, I have gained fifteen pounds in the space of two months. But you know what? There is nothing I could do, there is no failure big enough that would bring me as low as you are now. You think you're a fucking hero, Snape?"

She laughed, all fake and shrill. He put a hand unconsciously to his ugly scar and fought the urge to wince. "You think you did it for _love_? Take Lily out of it and what are you? An obsessive wreck. A gigantic loser. An insecure coward. Jesus _fuck_! You're still a bigger piece of shit than I could ever be. You want to know why I'm here? It's because I was assigned to your case, Snape. It's because you've gone completely _bonkers_! I thought you would be easier to _handle_ now that you have to take Antipsychotic medication just to function, but _Christ_—"

"And I suppose this is the part where you pretend to be cynical and sardonic like your failure couldn't matter less to you," he bit out, getting back to his feet and ignoring the bit about Antipsychotics.

"Did you practice that little speech in front of the mirror? Is that why you wear your hair back now, because you want so _desperately_ for people to know that you aren't little girl Granger anymore? I taught you for six years, you contemptuous _bitch_, and you learn a lot about someone in a classroom." He smiled horribly when he noticed her flinch at the name he called her.

"You're still nothing more than an over-eager, overrated, and completely ordinary girl, still championing the underdog, still naive and wide-eyed underneath those extra fifteen pounds, otherwise, why would you be here?"

Snape was prepared for most things: a slap, a yell, an affronted gasp, a tirade. Most things, I say, but laughter. He was completely taken aback. He stared at her as she bent over at the waist and wheezed, moisture seeping from her squeezed-shut eyelids. She calmed down enough for her to crack an eye open and look at him, but as soon as she caught sight of his gaping maw, the laughter started up again.

"Would you mind telling me what you find so amusing in this situation?" Snape asked, his voice prickly. He thought that she sounded like a garden-gnome having an aneurysm.

"No, it's not—_ha-ha_," she stuttered, clutching at her middle. "It's just... this is bloody _bizarre_. It's been so long since I actually had to think about what I would say next in a conversation. Hold on," she said, flapping her hand at him as he opened his mouth to speak. "I'm thinking of something devastatingly glib. Wait—_wait_—I am about to say something so clever that it will bloody well trump all clever things that have been said in the history of all time."

"Clearly," he started, but cut himself off when she began cackling anew. Bipolar, unstable, _dead_ Granger was his new Healer. A right character, indeed. Marvelous.

"_Clearly_ you are unsuited to be in any sort of professional standing, much less be _my_ Healer. I'm afraid you have been duped, Miss Granger, perfectly duped by whoever told you that you have a license to practice Healing. Either that, or the world has, as I predicted, gone to the dogs. I suggest you hand in your letter of resignation and save yourself whatever dignity you have left before it is too late. Good day, Healer Granger."

He headed to the door with the intent of wringing some semblance of happiness out of today. If he could just get away from the insane girl sitting in the staff room, he knew that there was hope. Perhaps that idiot Johns boy would be late to class again, and Snape could make him regret ever being born. If he could just get away from the staff room.

"This is good, Professor Snape," he heard from behind him. He really shouldn't have stopped. Every fiber in his being told him to keep walking. To Billow away and leave her with something to think about.

"Pardon me?" he said slowly. He turned to face her. She was sitting primly in her chair, like she didn't have a psychotic breakdown just moments ago. He was very irritated.

"Look, I'm sorry about that comment I made about your mother. That was terribly disrespectful, and I apologize. It's a horrid habit I picked up from Ron. But this is good progress," she said earnestly, pointing a finger first at him, then at herself. "Minerva told me that you would go for weeks without speaking to any of the staff."

"Whatever new-fangled method you've come up with to treat me, take it somewhere else. I assure you that it will not work."

"You know the only reason they keep you around is because of Harry, don't you? Harry's famous, but his influence can only go so far. You're hanging on by a thread. The board's just waiting for you to finally crack like they know you will. Oh, Minerva will fight for you, sure. But even she can't deny how much you've slipped off the edge."

He had nothing to say. For once in his life he had nothing to say, and he felt like a fumbling dolt, because this was his _brooding_ time, dammit, a time for justifying his sins and for stewing in resentment. This was not honesty time.

He had nothing to say. So he rasped, "Indeed."

"You were right about me, you know. I _am_ just as naive as I was. That's why I took this job. But there happens to be a lot of things you don't know about me, Mr. Smarty Man. There's a lot of joy in my life. I'm not dead." She said this serenely, with a look so bleeding-heart _Gryffindor_ that he had to fight the urge to smack it off her face.

"I am not one of your charity cases, Granger. Go find someone else to make you feel like you're contributing something to the betterment of the world. Or better yet, go back to your grave, where you belong."

"I'm not dead, Snape."

"Wonderful, I'm sure."

"Don't lose hope, Professor. We'll get there. Right now, you wouldn't know what to do with happiness if it sat naked and squirming in your lap. But we'll get there. I can help you be happy again."

He did not like confusion. Confusion was not a flattering look on him. He was not half as intimidating when he was confused as when he knew exactly what was going on. First, the girl was dead, then she was eating her sandwich like an obsessive-compulsive freak, then she was screaming and laughing, then she was _not_ dead, because how could he possibly hallucinate a wrinkled, defeated, fifteen-pound-heavier Hermione Granger? He wasn't sure what she was.

This had been happening far too often lately.

"I'm sure you'll try. But I watched you die eight years ago. It can't be done. Good day, Healer Granger."

* * *

A/N:

So, what do you think guys? Is it worth continuing?

Reviews make me a happy lady :)


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